Review: Ballet's 'Nutcracker' proves impressive

Peoria Ballet's "Nutcracker" came and went over the weekend at the Civic Center Theater - a splash of color and virtuoso dancing by company and guest dancers from the Miami Ballet and elsewhere.

GARY PANETTA

A REVIEW

PEORIA - Peoria Ballet's "Nutcracker" came and went over the weekend at the Civic Center Theater - a splash of color and virtuoso dancing by company and guest dancers from the Miami Ballet and elsewhere.

Those pirouettes and plies certainly impressed. But so did the score, snippets of which can be heard on television and radio in these weeks leading up to Christmas. At the performance on Saturday night, however, you were able to hear the whole thing uninterrupted and performed live by a contingent of musicians from the Peoria Symphony Orchestra conducted by music director David Commanday.

Christmas tinsel this score is not. Its character is variable, full of shifting moods: spacey and hallucinatory (the eerie music-box like sounds of the celesta in the dance of the Sugar Plum fairy); menacing and sinister (the dance of the toy soldier); magical and mysterious (the dance of snow angels with those sweeps of the harp).

The Peoria Ballet uses a version of the score that is somewhat pared down so individual instruments and sections stand out with delicate transparency. Long crescendoes built excitement. Coloristic effects added atmosphere. Commanday and the orchestra offered a reading of the score that was anything but pedestrian.

Guest artists Hayna Gutierrez of the Cuban National Ballet of Miami and Isanusi Garcia Rodriguez of the Miami City Ballet turned in a lyrical yet intense performance as the Sugar Plum Fairy and Cavalier. Spins, leaps and kicks were the order of the evening, with Rodriguez lifting Gutierrez toward the flies in a single, graceful movement. Lauren Pschirrer, another guest artist and one-time student at the Peoria Ballet, joined up with the local ballet's Jaidah Terry to portray the life-size mechanical dolls that amuse and amaze guests at the Stahlbaum Christmas Party in Act I. (The soldier doll is played by Adam Kittelberger.)

Pschirrer and Kittelberger return in Act II for a moody and exotic Arabian number. Pschirrer in particular manages to be languorous and athletic at the same time, moving seamlessly from what amounted to an airborne handstand supported by Kittelberger to a graceful floor pose. Other highlights were supplied by the Russian number, which included head-over-heels flips, cartwheels and kicks.

The costumes and sets were as eye-catching as the dancing: Dozens of pint-sized angels in beautiful white stood against an abstractly painted screen at the beginning of Act II; plump looking mice with pointy noses scurried across the stage frightening Clara (played by Ellen Cook on Saturday and by Mary McCarthy in Sunday afternoon's performance); and a host of wispy-looking frost fairies, snowflakes and icicles joined the Snow King and Queen (the excellent Benjamin Wardell and Virginia Pilgrim) in The Kingdom of the Snow number.

Credit for the choreography and overall flavor of the production goes to Erich Yetter, who also appeared once again as the mysterious Herr Drosselmeyer, who brings Clara the magic nutcracker.

From the score to the dancing to the eye-catching presentation, Peoria Ballet's "Nutcracker" impressed in every way. Christmas in Peoria wouldn't be complete without it.